‘Jazz Meets India’: The 1960s album that put musicians from the East and West on an equal footing

Featuring three Indians and three Europeans, the album represented a search for a new kind of world music.

Divan Motihar on the sitar and Kesh Sathe on the tabla. | Courtesy: 'Moonlighting in Broad Daylight', by Keshav and Katharine Sathe.

When music obsessives look back at the fruitful collaborations between musicians of different traditions in the 1960s, one year that will stand out for them is 1967. That was the year The Beatles released their seminal albumSgt Pepper Lonely Hearts Club, which included George Harrison’s Hindustani classical-inspired trackWithin You, Without You. That same year, John Mayer and Joe Herriot composedIndo-Jazz Fusions, an album that blended raga elements with jazz. And across the Atlantic, jazz great Don Ellis’ orchestra played his compositionContrasts for Two Orchestras and a Trumpetwith the Zubin Mehta-conducted Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Another fine example of such creative synthesis in 1967 was the albumJazz Meets India. Featuring three Indian Hindustani classical musicians and three European jazz musicians, the album represented a search for a new kind of world music – one that could bind together diverse audiences and be universally loved. According to critics,Jazz Meets Indiawas one of the first instances when musicians from the East and the West performed on an equal footing.

Waxbro/YouTube.

This intermingling of musical styles had started in the late 1950s. Aided by Cold War politics, and their own creative impulses, musicians began to cross traditional borders. Ali Akbar Khan and Ravi Shankar were among the better-known musicians who collaborated with the likes of Dave Brubeck, Bud Shank, Dennis Budimir and John Handy, among others. But there were also those who moved to the West for better opportunities and for reasons entirely providential. One such artist was Keshav Sathe, who played the tabla onJazz Meets IndiaandIndo-Jazz Fusions.

Born in Goregaon, Bombay, in 1928, Sathe’s first job was in the city’s General Post Office, and second as an accounts officer of the state government. In 1956, he was deputed to work in the accounts section of the Indian High Commission in London.

Sathe had been a chess player of some repute in Bombay – he met the American chess great Bobby Fischer in Leipzig in 1960 – but it was the tabla that truly fascinated him. It wasn’t always easy for him to follow his passion. As Sathe wrote in his memoirMoonlighting in Broad Daylight(co-written with wife Katharine), his strict Brahmin father had imposed a taboo on touching the tabla since its head is made of goat skin.

Besides Sathe, another Indian on bothIndo-Jazz FusionsandJazz Meets Indiawas the sitar player Dewan Motihar. Deepa Motihar, his wife who lives in Delhi, and Balwant Bhaneja, a Canadian diplomat of Sindhi origin whose family once knew the Motihar brothers, provided details of Dewan Motihar’s otherwise sketchy early life. According to them, Motihar, who was born in 1927, was a song artist for All India Radio in Delhi in the 1950s and played the sitar and the Hawaiian guitar. He was also known for his Sindhi Sufi songs. Like Sathe, work led Motihar to London.

London soirees

In the late 1950s and ’60s, Sathe and Motihar were part of a group of Indian musicians in London who gathered, often informally, for soirees and concerts. These performances were organised by Ayana Deva Angadi’sAsian Music Circleat the High Commission or at private residences.

Musician Viram Jasani recounts the impromptu concerts in his father’s West London house that became a meeting point for Indian musicians and music aficionados. During several such occasions, he says,Motihar and Sathe played together, as Shamshad Bai (actress Saira Banu’s grandmother) sang. They also provided accompaniments to the actor-dancer Surya Kumari’s recitals. Surya Kumari, once a well-known film actor and singer in Madras Presidency, was popular in the UK as a dancer. In 1965, she acted in a play calledKindly Monkeys, for which Motihar and Sathe played the music.

Jazz Meets Indiatook shape in January 1967 when Mani Neumeier, a German percussionist who hadstudied and workedwith Motihar, contacted Sathe. As Sathe recounts in his memoir, Neumeier had created a version of a drum called the Mani-tom, playing which involved blown air via a thin hosepipe. Neumeier suggested to Sathe the possibility of a musical collaboration (not on the Mani-tom though). The idea had the encouragement ofmusic visionaryand writer Joachim-Ernst Berendt, who was deeply interested in different musical traditions.

Bodobado/YouTube.

Kusum Thakur on the tanpura was the last member of the Indian trio. A kathak dancer who had performed for the BBC in London, Thakur had also acted in Hindi films likeTalaaqandLeader.

On the album, the Indian and European trios were named after the lead instrumentalists: the Dewan Motihar trio and the Irène Schweizer trio (with the Swiss-born pianist Schweizer, Uli Trepte on bass and Neumeier). Accompanying them were Manfred Schoof on the trumpet and Barney Wilen on the tenor saxophone.

The musicians met each other for the first time two days before they were scheduled to perform at the Donaueschingen festival in the Black Forest region. The album was recorded at Villingen-Schwenningen, and a week later, they opened the Berlin Jazz Festival as part of Berendt’sJazz Meets the Worldseries.

The 37-minuteJazz Meets Indiahad three tracks, with Motihar on sitar leading in the first track,Sun Love. Motihar’s scat singing style was evident in the next track,Yaad.In the last trackBrigach and Ganges– the name drew from two revered rivers in Germany and India, to symbolise the spirit of collaboration – the freeform jazz gave way seamlessly to the clearly recognisable tones of a classical raga. The 1970 issue ofJazz Forum, a magazine of the International Jazz Federation, described the album as “one of the most important record editions of the last few years”.